“Comp” crowdsourcer CompStak secures $4.5M in new funding

New York-based CompStak has secured $4.45 million in financing that will allow the commercial real estate information startup to expand nationwide and offer new products, its co-founder told The Real Deal.

CompStak crowdsources rent prices, square footage, building income, tenants and other leasing information – detailed records known as “comps” that brokers put a high value on – that had never been collected in a systematic and centralized way.

The new cash infusion “is really meaningful for us as a company and really meaningful for the industry,” CompStak co-founder Michael Mandel said in an interview yesterday. “There’s a major shift going on in the industry, and new companies on the scene are really going to make an impact.”

CompStak refuses to sell its data to brokers or anyone else who could influence it, opting instead to swap information with them. It does sell the detailed records to landlords, asset managers and private equity firms for more than $20,000 a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the new investment.

Much of the new funding came from venture capital firm Canaan Partners, although 500 Startups, Founder Collective and Expansion VC also invested this round, Mandel said.

CompStak intends to use the funds to go into every major market in the country and to add more data analysts and sales staff, Mandel said.

Also on the horizon are more products, he said: “Right now we’re focused on lease comps, but we’re going to move beyond lease comps. We’re a real estate data company that uses crowdsourcing to gather data, and we’ll do that in new ways.”

In January, CompStak launched a revamped service that allows brokers to see the history of comps for a given space and announced an expansion into San Francisco, as TRD reported. The company had secured roughly $1.25 million in its first funding cycle from companies including Expansion VC, Ryan Slack, co-founder of PropertyShark; and 500 Startups.

The commercial real estate industry’s growing demand for increased information transparency has sparked the growth of CompStak and other tech-savvy startups such as compliance manager SiteCompli and leasing management platform View the Space, as TRD previously reported.